The majority of people spend at least a couple hours online everyday often looking for help with a problem or
simply wanting to be entertained. A small business blog can fulfill one or both of these requisites while helping you to develop a closer relationship with business clients. Statistics show that websites that also have a blog receive on average 55 percent more visitors resulting in 126 percent higher lead growth. Follow the six simple steps below to achieve the same success for your small business.
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Choose an Appropriate Blogging Platform
Everyone has different preferences as to what makes the best article writing provider. While most are quite similar, you should take into consideration your need for customization, whether the templates on offer are suitable, and other factors. Your choice may also depend on your prior programming capabilities and experience; if you know only very little, you should select a platform that will guide you through the creation process.
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Develop Content
The content on your small business blog should consist of information the reader did not know before. This can be anything relevant to your field of business as long as it is useful and entertaining; for example, food companies may choose to post recipes while home maintenance businesses could opt to publish tips helping readers avoid common problems or offer DIY projects. While there should be no mention of your company's services or products, you can end posts with a link sending readers to your main business site.
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Focus on Layout
The aesthetics of your small business blog are central to grabbing the attention of the visitor. You should include subheadings, important phrases in bold, text broken up with images, bullet point lists and anything else you can to make the page more interesting. You must also include a page title, meta description and internal page links to make your content writing SEO rich. Of this, the title is the most important, as it will most likely be the URL, and should include some keywords. The optimal length of a blog post is 400 to 600 words in order to keep readers interested.
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Offer a Number of Subscription Options
Your readers are far more likely to return to your blog if they are subscribed either through email or RSS. Offering both options will increase the number of your subscribers as many people have a preference of one over the other. You should also make it easy for readers to share content on social media sites such as Reddit, Digg and LinkedIn as well as the possibility to follow you on Twitter and Facebook. Ensure that a bar with these options is incorporated into your small business blog and is clearly visible.
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Track Your Statistics
In order to best develop content in the future, you need to know what posts are receiving the most views and comments, and what content is being shared. Some blogging platforms automatically provide you with these statistics while others require you to manually add a Javascript code to your small business blog.
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Avoid Advertising
Advertising can ruin the appearance of your small business blog and is in fact only useful when you are receiving a very high amount of traffic. Similarly, pop up screens annoy readers and may even deter them from revisiting your page. Pop up screens should be kept to a minimum such as one time when the reader first enters the blog.
What methods have been central the success of your small business blog?
